


hold some dirt with those hands

by magdaliny



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Fix-It, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), gratuitous handwaving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 13:52:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14522007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magdaliny/pseuds/magdaliny
Summary: It had sent him to his knees.





	hold some dirt with those hands

**Author's Note:**

> _Mille remerciements_ to the usual suspects, and especially Saffrn, for the title, and Dira, for inspiration.

When it's all over, later, standing beside the river and watching dust, twigs, small crumpled things flowing downstream, Steve can still smell it. Copper and carbon. Organic. Unnameable. He thought he'd cleaned enough, stripping down and scrubbing every inch of his body with dry grass and then with soil and then with a handful of white sand, fine as sugar between his fingers. Grains under his nails, still, even now that he's washed, dressed himself, washed his hands again. And again. But he must have missed something. Or maybe it's him: he could be bleeding internally. Does it hurt? He can't tell. He can't remember what chemicals are involved in this kind of thing, aside from adrenaline. The come-down. What makes terror in the brain? What makes it in the body? What makes it stop? He could ask Bucky, but—

His lungs expand. Deflate.

Steve takes his phone out of his pocket and dials from memory. The static, the reassuring tones of a secure connection whirling into alignment somewhere else, somewhere in space, he guesses. Where the signal bounces. Or on Earth, maybe, in a tower somewhere between here and New York. For a moment he isn't sure whether he'll get through. Lots of people will be phoning their loved ones, right now. The lines must be full to bursting. Steve pictures a swollen garden hose, pin-pricked with holes, leaking words of comfort all around the world.

“Steven,” Peggy says. She sounds thready but good; she always sounds good to him. After three HYDRA-sponsored assassination attempts in late 2016, her faculties improving steadily under a new trial drug, she had made the executive decision that a quiet retirement was not in the cards if she continued to live in DC. If she continued to live at all. A Pandora's box of secrets recovering its key. The cruel minds of the world wouldn't have it. After the mock funeral, after Germany, after Wakanda, when the only other option available to him was watching Bucky sleep under the ice, Steve had visited her: Tony'd been hovering, he remembers. Peggy caught in the act of throwing a slipper. It'd shocked Steve, Tony being there. They'd stared at each other across the room as sunlight drenched the carpet in long honeyed strips until Peggy'd said _Anthony, for god's sake_ , and Tony had said: _I wasn't wrong, I still don't think I was wrong; it was the right thing to do_ and Peggy'd replied, tartly, _W_ _e all_ _told_ _ourselves that, at one point or another._ _And sometimes we were even right_. The look on Tony's face. _I know_ , Steve had said: _I'm sorry_. _Me too_ , Tony said. Not looking at him. They hadn't been talking about Bucky. They didn't. They never would.

“Pegs,” Steve says.

He feels a hand on the small of his back. There's only one person it could be, only one person who could've come up behind him that quietly. He doesn't turn. His lungs: expanding. What do they look like, inside him? Do they look like everyone else's? Do they look like meat, too? The smell. His breath hitching out of him like something falling down the stairs.

“Are you all right?” Peggy asks. Demands, really. There's steel in it. “The news is going absolutely barmy, darling, I can't make head nor tails of it, are you _all right_?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I'm all right, I.” Lungs. _Focus_. “It—it was bad, we, we lost a lot of people, Pegs, we—”

His voice cracks. His throat closes.

The warmth at his back presses closer. Steve feels the phone being taken out of his unresisting grip. His hand doesn't drop, as he looks out over the river, the crumpled things. Oil on the surface, and ashes. His fingers curling at his collar, knuckles against the long muscle fluttering there, his quick-march pulse. Stop, he thinks at it vaguely. Slow down. He read somewhere that the speed of a heartbeat correlates with life expectancy. Mice and blue whales have roughly the same number of cardiac muscle contractions in their lives, but a mouse's heart beats so much faster. It doesn't mean he'll hit his last one and keel over on the spot, he knows that, it doesn't work that way; but he wants more time, needs more time, he'd bargain with God for minutes, seconds, for the smallest unit of measurement in the universe if he could just trap it between his sticky palms. There won't ever be enough _time_.

Steve can hear Peggy, at a distance, saying: _Steve? Are you there, Steve?_ He shudders. His body is here but not all of him is in it. _Steve?_ The small edges of a voice that had never once, to him, been small. The fear. He closes his eyes. The river keeps flowing inside them.

“Heya, Peg,” Bucky says.

Bucky's hand slides to Steve's hip, then further, around his waist, winching them closer together. Bucky's shoulder behind Steve's shoulder. His soft hair against Steve's neck, his cheek, his hovering hand.

“We're okay,” Bucky says. “Yeah. He's just in shock, there were a lot of—Wakandans. Died. Good people. And we had a close call, I think. Everybody's just—scared.”

They talk. They talk some more. It doesn't quite reach Steve, where he goes. The river inside him and the drifting ashes. He wants to reach out and touch them. He wants to sift them from the water. Before the battle began, some of the warriors went down to the river, a different river, and they mixed handfuls of it with the pale clay dusting the banks and stripped down and smeared it on each other's skin in pairs, laughing, their clear strong voices calling out over the water. One of them had begun to sing, and three of his friends had waded out into the river and pounded the surface with their palms like the whole of it was a drum, splashing up high, water in their laughing mouths, crystals in the air and those huge crisp sounds. Steve had thought, absurdly, of Kaiser Wilhelm. August 1914, standing before his troops. _You will be home_ , he'd said to them, _Before the leaves fall from the trees_. Then as now, that had been true for some of them. Then as now, it'd been seconds that mattered—or hadn't, in fact; the absurdity of it. When it came to not mattering, time was everything. Steve asked: why didn't all of them come back? Bad timing, he'd been told. Just bad luck.

“Yeah,” Bucky is saying now. “You too, doll. I will. Bye, Peg.” His hand squeezing at Steve's waist, proprietary. In Steve's peripheral vision he can see Bucky holding the phone, navigating something with his thumb. Shuri must have put something on the prosthetic so it would work with touch screens. Steve doesn't know what to think of that. “Well,” Bucky says tiredly. “That could've gone better.” His secretary voice for Peggy, smoother and lighter. His grit and gravel for Steve. He shuts the phone off and slides it into Steve's pocket. “You gonna turn around anytime soon, slugger?”

“I can't.”

“Hey. Look at me.”

“I can't,” Steve says.

“Sure you can. Hey. C'mon. Steven Grant—” Bucky grabs him and turns him and he tries to struggle free, turn his face away, but Bucky grabs his whole skull and makes him, makes him look, makes them look right into each other's eyes.

“You were _dead_!” Steve shouts. It's halfway to a scream, too close, pitched too high, the yowl of something caught in a trap. He's never heard a sound like that come out of him before. It terrifies him. Bucky flinches finely, across the whole of his skin, like a horse. Steve's eyes slam closed. “You were dead, I _saw_ you, I watched you—they had to turn back _time_ , you weren't here, you were somewhere else, you were _nowhere_ , there wasn't even a body, I had to _wait—_ ”

“Oh,” Bucky says. Shockingly mild. “That Strange fella said I hit my head, but I was pretty sure he was lying. I guess that's why I don't remember. How come you do?”

“I was.” Steve swallows. It hurts. “I was—outside. Strange said someone had to be a. An anchor? So I just—”

“—watched,” Bucky says, and then sighs out long and gusty as though he's trying to empty his lungs and sink. He used to do it at the Metropolitan, back before the war. The water'd been good to Steve's joints, and it'd been good to Bucky like everything was good to Bucky: air, water, paint, blood, it didn't matter. The world laid itself on Bucky beautifully always, it'd seemed to Steve. Now he knows how much of an act it was, how precise, how much God damn energy it took to maintain what'd come across as effortless. Steve couldn't hold his breath very long back then, but he'd often put his head just beneath the surface so he could watch Bucky sink, crossing his legs on the way like a Buddha or a saint, and he'd stay down there for close to a minute, sometimes, before he'd kick off the tiles and come rocketing up. Steve used to ask him what it was like, what it felt like to hold your breath on purpose, what he'd thought about there in the muffled dark. But Bucky always just shook his head. In the plane with the water surging up over his head Steve had thought: _Oh. Oh, I understand_.

Steve says: “I wanted to.” It was better than being useless, he doesn't say, better than watching with nothing to show for it, better than wringing his hands: to know his cells, his bones, were holding together something greater than the sum of his parts. Something that could matter as much as anything could matter. Any number greater than zero.

“You fuckin' martyr,” Bucky says, hearing it anyway. “Who do you think you are, huh? Taking the whole world's sins on your shoulders? C'mon, Steve. _Look_ at me. Hey. There you go. There you are, champ. Let's go inside, okay? Let's just—go inside.”

Steve feels Bucky tug at him. His feet must lift. They must, because he gets to the hut in the end. Bucky doesn't waste any time removing his prosthetic and tossing it on a pile of laundry in the corner. He isn't wearing shoes, Steve realizes. When did he take them off? Did he leave them in the field? There isn't any combat gear in the hut. There isn't much of anything. Blankets. Pillows. Pots and pans hung from hooks on the rafters, swaying. Books stacked neatly next to the bed. Steve hasn't been here before. Whenever he's visited Bucky's come to him, up the hill to the palace where someone is always singing, where they'd talked and touched and loved one another on white sheets, on stone floors, leaning against wide-open windows looking out over the city, its bustle and life. It will be quiet today, on the hill. The singers are burying the bodies.

“I can still smell it,” Steve says.

Bucky, deftly stripping the bed and re-making it one-handed, pauses and looks at him. Standing in the doorway as though he hasn't been invited.

“Smell what?” Bucky asks.

And Steve says, “I don't know.”

 

* * *

 

The third time Steve jerks awake from the dream, clawing the ashes into his hands, his lap, his fucking _mouth_ , anywhere that'll keep them safe, hold them together so they won't get lost, keep the atoms in them talking to each other until it's time, until— Bucky grabs at Steve's neck, his face, and he says, “Okay.”

Panting: “Okay?” He feels fevered. Delirious. The room swims. Bucky's hand on his skin is frigid. Is it the left one? No: he's not wearing it. No, _no_ : that one's gone. Bucky's hand is cold, flesh-cold, regular-cold; it's the room. Steve hadn't expected it to get cold at night in Africa but it does, the humidity amplifying the force of it, damp searing right through to your bones. No wonder Bucky has so many blankets down here by the river. “Okay,” Steve says, and then he scrambles out of Bucky's arms. He just makes it outside before he throws up.

“No,” Bucky says, when Steve comes back in and tries to lay on top of the blankets on the end of the bed. Steve can't bear it. He smells ill, like sweat, like fear: rank. “Get in here. Jesus. You don't have to sleep but you're not sleeping there.”

Bucky bullies Steve down, under the covers, closer and closer until he's laying curled with his head on Bucky's good shoulder, shivers running through him in waves. Bucky's arm an iron bar around his ribs. He hasn't been sick in years and years. Steve had forgotten what it was like, how it felt, how intimate, how—shameful. The betrayal of the body. The indignity of it all. He tucks up smaller, smaller, fighting his muscles, pushing his face into Bucky's neck.

“You don't have to tell me what happened,” Bucky says quietly. “In fact, don't. I don't think I _want_ to know. We got enough night terrors between the two of us already.”

“Just,” Steve says. He can't breathe. “Just—can you say my name?”

Perplexed: “Steve?” No, no, no; oh god.

“No, no—not like that—”

“Steve.” _Low_.

“Yes,” Steve gasps, “Please,” and quick as lightning Bucky has him in a headlock, arching his back, baring teeth against his ear and growling: “Steve; _Steve_.” His sobbing-out breath on Bucky's skin. Steve reaches up and grabs hold, wrist and elbow, not to get loose but to feel it, the muscles, the bones, the pieces of him that are mostly air, mostly void, held together by something infinitesimal and vaster than he can comprehend, the impossible weight of them existing here, now, solid in the dark. If now has any meaning. If solid is the thing they are. Solid as they can be: their atoms, their electricity, their long blue veins aligned in time and space. For now.

“Please,” Steve says, and Bucky says: “Steve.”

They do sleep. Eventually.

In the morning Bucky pulls him from the wreckage of the bed and takes him naked to the river. He stands still as Bucky gathers handfuls of gritty mud from the bank, scrubbing it over Steve's skin, lifting his feet to rub at his arch and between his toes; the creases of his hips, his navel, the notch of his throat, so careful on his face. His hair. Tender in perpetuity: those hands. Steve has always thought of Bucky's hands as tender, even when they were killing him.

“They say this stuff's got healing properties,” Bucky says. He sounds unconvinced. “On account of the vibranium. God knows I'm no metallurgist but I guess it makes sense—silver's antibacterial, and it stands to reason if you can have an iron deficiency you could have a vibranium deficiency too. Good for the skin, anyway.”

Steve's not quite listening. He's looking out over the water.

It had sent him to his knees. The reel reversing all at once. It wasn't like a sound at all but he thought of something being struck. The universe popping back into place like a joint. It was the biggest thing he'd ever felt, bigger than the chamber, bigger than the plane hitting the water, bigger than a portal in the sky, in New York, on a sunny Tuesday. He'd thought about the people, of course, the people everywhere, and he'd imagined ash billowing high, the scaffolding of faces reforming, dropped glasses skittering together on parquet floors and leaping up, up, into a hundred million hands; he'd felt it all. But he'd wondered, too, about the uncomprehending minds, the animal life: silty creatures in the rivers and birds crying out in confused circles and the simpler things, plankton and sea stars and glassy diatoms, and down in the crushing deep there were fish without eyes and senses he can't begin to imagine: what had they felt? When the Earth rang like a bell?

The water is up to his calves. Steve blinks. Bucky is walking backwards, holding his hand. Steve steps hugely towards him and the distance between them gets smaller. Logical. Physics at work. They go out, and further, until their feet leave the reedy bottom and they have to kick to stay afloat. The buoyancy of stones, both of them, after the serum. Steve reaches out and puts his hands on Bucky's shoulders like he'd done when they were young, so young; he doesn't remember the age, but he remembers Becca dog-paddling towards them and saying _You aren't scared, are you, Stevie?_ and Winnie saying _You were scared your first time too, moppet, and look at you now_. Becca'd said _Nuh-uh!_ as Bucky'd lifted Steve's hands from his shoulders and laughed. His round little face. His blue eyes. _It's easy! See, Stevie: see?_ And he had.

Bucky's hand gentle on the crown of his head. Steve goes under.

Beneath the water everything is slow. Slow his limbs. Slow the noise of his body. Slow Bucky's fingers in his hair, his beard, rinsing off the mud, the smell, the taste. The river takes it away. The ashes and the mighty sound. He hasn't been under nearly long enough to run out of breath, but he gasps anyway when he comes to the surface, trembling. The euphoria of oxygen. His leaping heart and Bucky's face: the creases under his eyes where Steve sets his thumbs, careful as he can be with his monstrous strength. The feeling in him. Rising warm and golden as he breathes in, in, in, his lungs, his belly, his kicking feet, oh, _oh_. Thank God. Thank God.

Bucky smiles.

On the far bank the laundry-folk are coming through the trees, men and women swaying their hips for balance, barefoot, dancers in the early light. The baskets on their heads are woven from grasses and twists of bright metal; he's watched them being made. Laughter cuts across the river as they crouch down beside it. Life goes on. The washing needs to be done. The children are hungry. The hearts of mice and blue whales beating, still. The world is always ending for someone, somewhere, but everywhere else life goes on—and on and on.

And on.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Tranquil](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16167251) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)




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